Scenario-adaptive and gain-aware content sharing policies for cooperative wireless environments

Cellular customers, interested in accessing a given content on the network, can enter a mutual cooperative relationship and gain advantages from the heterogeneity of networks and device interfaces. This cooperative attitude may enable innovative content distribution paradigms far from the traditional centralised approach. As a result, cooperating users save download time, devices’ energy, and connection fees. The work reported in this paper differs from previous works dealing with cooperative content distribution in that it aims at providing a clear analysis of the influence that some key parameters (relationship between short-range and cellular data rates, number of cooperating devices, heterogeneity of cellular coverage, and time-variance in capacity) have on the design and the performance of content sharing policies. The proposed cooperative framework, unlike many blind schemes in the literature, encompasses awareness of the potential gain of cooperation and adapts the choice of the content sharing strategy to different cooperative scenarios.